Human Insight Podcast

This week on the Human Insight podcast, we interviewed Emily Carrion, VP of Marketing at Esper and veteran of the Seattle startup scene. 

In her interview with Janelle Estes, UserTesting’s Chief Insights Officer, Carrion discusses:

• Her observations on the progress being made in getting more women startup founders, board members, and senior leaders
• The marketing challenges she is addressing this quarter
• Why it’s important to hear directly from customers, in their own voices
• What startups should prioritize with their customer feedback and testing?
• Her advice developing continuous engagement with customers

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This week on the Human Insight podcast, we interview April Dunford, a tech executive, board member, CEO and founder of Ambient Strategy, and author of Obv!ously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It.

In her interview with Janelle Estes, UserTesting’s Chief Insights Officer, Dunford discusses: 

• Is positioning just for startups
• How has the pandemic changed the role of positioning 
• How our biases inhibit our positioning efforts
• Who should be involved in positioning
• The importance of customer feedback in developing your positioning
• And how to identify your best fit customers

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In this episode, Andy and Janelle recap highlights from Season 2 of the Human Insights Podcast, as well as offer a sneak peak at what’s in store for season three, which kicks off in September.

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Catherine Richards said one way Tesco Bank builds a CX culture is through positive disruption.

“And what I mean by that is, as leaders, you need to know when to make a call to positively disrupt how you're working,” said Richards, who is head of design at Tesco Bank. 

An example was introducing Customer Wednesdays, a day dedicated in the week to spending time with the bank’s customers. They started that four years ago, bringing in customers to get feedback early in the design process. That’s continued during the pandemic, just that now they get that feedback remotely. 

“When you tell a story about a customer that you've seen, or you've spent time with, there's just something about that, that people remember. They remember the customer stories,” Richards said.    

In her conversation with Janelle Estes, Chief Insights Officer at UserTesting, Richards goes on to discuss:

• What is the role of leadership in driving customer-centric design and experiences
• What metrics or KPIs does her team directly or indirectly influence
• How has the financial services/bank customer experience evolved over the course of your career?

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Christian Idiodi has led or consulted on nearly 200 successful product launches for a range of companies from startups to big banks. So, you’d think he always wanted a career in product management, right? 

“Actually, I wanted to be a doctor,” said the partner at Silicon Valley Product Group, a global product consulting firm. “I wanted to solve hard problems like cancer or HIV. That was always what I had dreamed and aspired to be.”

Idiodi joined the Human Insight Podcast to discuss what makes a great product manager, how companies and managers should invest in coaching their product managers, and how product managers work with teams to ensure customer satisfaction. 

In his conversation with Andy MacMillan, CEO at UserTesting, and Janelle Estes, Chief Insights Officer at UserTesting, Idiodi discusses:

• His role today at SVPG
• His new initiative, Innovate Africa
• How the product world has evolved over the years
• Best practices for developing and coaching product managers and leaders
• Staying close to the customer
• Balancing processes and innovation

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As Jim Kalbach likes to say, work is not an office it is what we accomplish together. 

As many companies are now planning if and when their employees return to offices, the questions of what work is and how we accomplish it are top of mind. 

This week’s Human Insight Podcast dives into the topic in a roundtable discussion with Mariano Suarez-Battan, co-founder and CEO at MURAL; Kalbach, Chief Evangelist at MURAL; Andy MacMillan, CEO at UserTesting, and Janelle Estes, Chief Insights Officer at UserTesting. 

In their conversation, they discuss: 

• Distributed collaboration
• Digital Transformation
• Diversity & Inclusion

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How do you build a customer-focused design team that scales?

Susan Rice has done it three times. She’s the Vice President of UX at Workiva, a global SaaS reporting compliance platform that enables the use of connected data and automation for reporting across finance, accounting, risk, and compliance.

In her Human Insight Podcast interview with Janelle Estes, UserTesting’s Chief Insights Officer, Rice discusses: 

• Building a customer-focused team
• Her favorite UX design KPI
• UX design differences between B2B and B2C
• Advice for those embarking on a design career

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The pandemic has changed so much about retail, but some retail trends will outlast the pandemic, such as providing a personalized experience, says Sean McKee, the former Director of eCommerce and CX at UK footwear retailer, Schuh.

In his Human Insight Podcast interview with Janelle Estes, UserTesting’s Chief Insights Officer, McKee discusses: 

• His 25-year career at Schuh from storeroom to boardroom
• The biggest changes to retail and ecommerce over that time
• Keeping a customer focus in a sea of ecommerce data points

“What retailers have to think about is the question of experience and what experience looks like because if doing things that were at the experiential end of the spectrum were important before COVID, they're even more important now,” McKee said. “Customers really need to have a compelling reason to visit your store because they've just had an education that tells them they can do other things. So, the experiential stuff is important.”

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Dan Storms, CookUnity’s Chief Product Officer, said adding steps to their sign up process had a positive result on the business. 

It was a counterintuitive action  from a design perspective. Usually, you want to eliminate steps. But listening to their best, most raving fans, yielded insights that a few added questions initially would result in an even better experience for customers. 

And it was great for CookUnity, too. They saw a 50% increase in conversions. 

The three-year-old startup is a direct-to-consumer meal delivery platform that allows its customers to choose a range of ready-to-eat meals from celebrity and up-and-coming chefs. It’s based in New York City, recently opened its second community kitchen in Los Angeles, and delivers to twenty-seven states.

In his Human Insight podcast interview with Janelle Estes, UserTesting’s Chief Insights Officer, Storms goes on to discuss: 

• How they leveraged two bestsellers to create a framework for customer listening that they then applied to their product and market strategy
• How to validate customer feedback with surveys
• Insights on planning the NY Product Conference

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Are you speaking the language of your executives? 

If you’ve been sending them a doc to explain your latest great idea, you’re not. 

Because they speak in the language of spreadsheets. 

In Episode 12 of the Human Insight #podcast, @Tamara Adlin discusses the importance of understanding your audience, especially when your audience are your executives. In this episode, you'll learn:

• Her seminal book, The Essential Persona Lifecycle: Your Guide to Building and Using Personas
• Her magic trick to achieving executive alignment
• Startups and the Catch 22 of the MVP

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